life

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Island Blog – Diving the Deeps

Today I worked at changeovers in the sunshine with a fablious team. I had to learn my way around the check list for each property, four tea towels here, two there, one for glass and one for otherness. The store cupboards, floor to ceiling, hold super king duvet kit, king, double and single. I did, momentarily wonder where the hell are the queens in all this! Well, I know where they are. They’re plotting in the dark spaces, along with the cobwebs, not that I found one of those. That is how it is, even now when we might all do well to acknowledge the fact that queens and women who never got the crown will not be kept in the dark for long.

I buzzed here and there, cleaning windows, scrubbing loos, working impossible duvets into the resistance of their covers, as if they had tasted freedom for just a few hours and were dead pissed off at the thought of, again, obliging into a well-ironed confine for yet another week. What might be the word for someone who gives life to things? I have no answer. Anyway, I am digressing, madly. I was somewhere else for about four hours with wonderful women in the team, with no mobile reception and the sky blue, the wind very Sahara, blowing leaflets and sticky information sheets off their blue tack restraints, and visitors who stopped by for coffee and stayed for ages. We watched, from the laundry, a line of classic cars thrum by, their bellies way to low for our island potholes, and then, later, big bikers on big bikes, turning in, all leathered up and grinny, for big ass sandwiches and the chance to swelter in the very focussed sunshine. the doors to the cafe stayed open, until a Sahara blast thwacked them shut. Folk came with dogs wearing shorts, the humans, not the dogs, and for a short while conversation lifted from the sort of sheltered outside bit and up into the sky, stories and laughter flying like birds. A conjumble of fablious. We don’t have many such days here and we know how to celebrate the fun of the moment, to grab it, but not to expect a hold, for it can so quickly be snatched away.

I knew I wanted physical work. I can still jinx and bend, not only with my body, but also with my thinking. I have dived deep throughout my life, seeking what I could never have, and finding that which I never sought, a sudden surprise, a something that stopped my flow and caught my breath, like a new understanding. And that, I now know, only comes over time lived, experiential time. We sort , (I say ‘We’ only because I have talked with others on this), our expectations and our disappointments into an acceptable line like a track we know we must walk. We know there are potholes and, jeez, there are some spectacular ones here. My mini could disappear completely in one, although, and here I go again, she has no intention of losing anything, never mind herself. We talk. I warn her, or she, if I am suddenly zooming, warns me. It works, this communication I have with things. Someone once said to me, they actually did, that I cannot talk to plants and I did give an eye roll at that. It isn’t such a stretch to ‘things’. Not for me. If I need something to work with me and I with that thing, my garden gate, for example, which refused to shut properly until we had a chat, then I need to initiate conversation. Had I been born in Westmoreland in an earlier era, I have no doubt I would have been burned at the stake.

Depth in life is asking to be dived. I know the surface is safe but it is also boring. I cannot see opportunity beyond what is under my control. I want to risk, to dive, to possibly struggle, but isn’t this living, isn’t this fun? I have no interest in control, although I am definitely me and the definitely me is still wild.

Who would choose less?

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Island Blog – Survive, Flourish and Life

I watch a robin cling to a fat feeder, wings dinging. It can last just long enough to get a mouthful, pinging back onto the fence and looking around as if to say ‘ so?’ I smile. I think it smiles back as its wee black eye clocks me doing this watching thing, but I’m unsure about the ability of a beak to smile. I see sparrows do the same, their feet adapting to feeders, their learning pivotal to survival. And, it thinks me. We do it too, we humans, adapt when survival seems beyond our understanding. We become inventive. And, thus, we survive and flourish. At first, the robin floundered and wobbled and fluttered as if gravity had won, but not now. Now it holds, steadies, self-corrects and stays, as I said, long enough for a mouthful. I think of my own life and all the adapting I have undergone, and it makes a perfect sense, for I have encountered many, many of those who, or is it whom, I just knew were not going to make it. And that saddened me and still does.

From a young age, well, about 20 years old/young, I knew I wanted to be a survivor, more, a flourisher. I had no substance to support my knowing, no experiential wisdom, but I just knew. That, may I say, is a tough thing to hold inside, because everyone wants facts around any such pronouncement. I did not pronounce. I had no facts to support my ‘theory’. It just grew like a newing and a knowing in me until I found someone who, older than I by a decade, had tried out a few of his theories and was equipped with some gravitas. T’is a shame, in my opinion, that we don’t listen to the young and their beliefs, and still now we don’t, because our culture decides them into schools and subjects and noise and ‘success’, confizing a sunburst into a tiny, and ‘acceptable’ light. Just saying.

I walked today beneath gale-strafed bows, the trees quiet but I know what’s going on inside their heads. Kathleen will return tomorrow, the gale thus named, resurrecting the waves, upsetting the fisherman, turmoiling the ocean into lifts and spits and deeps and discordance and none of us need it, not even the great Atlantic. I notice nubs of new growth littering the track, and it used to bother me. I thought, Oh No, the new growth is gone! Not so. The trees know what goes on here. The first fruits of growth push out anyway, the birds, hungry, long winter (and still not gone) pick off the growth to find the juicy life beneath. Their long hunger is lifted and I can hear them sing from those branches, inviting in a mate, life all over again.

And that is what I knew, without a damn clue, way back when I was 20, that life does that over again thing. We get through shit. We keep going. New life is beckoning. Trauma, bereavement, enforced change, even a move into a world we have never encountered. We can adapt. We can. And, we can not only survive but flourish, because we are strong and intelligent and an important part in what happens next.

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Island Blog – To Head for the Stars

As I move forward, always forward, even if it feels like I’m moving back, I know that we all are. When someone says ‘I am going back to work, back home, back to school, back to the ordinary’ I will gently question. How can you be going back when you have experienced so much since last you were in those places? I believe you are going forward to them all, or to whichever one applies. Think on it. You possibly made a new friend, learned a new thing, experienced a change, noticed something you hadn’t noticed before. We are always moving forward, always, even, and I repeat myself here, if it feels like we are moving ‘back’.

We may, agreed, be returning to familiar circumstances, be it a job we hate, a relationship that no longer works, or a a school that doesn’t respect us in the way we need. There are many such scenarios. But we have, even if only in our minds, left those places in our understanding. So what do we need right now? Will we continue on the old and comfortably uncomfortable treadmill, or will we find the courage to say No. Enough. In other words to speak out our own truth. And that is a tough ask, I know it, but if we don’t, then nothing, nothing, nothing changes and everyone thinks we are ok about the totally not ok of our lives. We always know when we are unhappy or unfulfilled. The feeling has grown for weeks, months, years, but we seem unable to rise up and shout, unwilling to cause a stir, to rock the boat, to make a ghastly mess. And Life trudges on without us, when what she really wants is to spread her wings, to hunker down for us to climb aboard and thence to lift us both into a sky of hope, adventure and stars.

The reasons for staying stuck lie, mostly, in the old voices, the old judges, the ones we have held on to for years, even when those voices are stilled in death. We take them on like clothing, wear them, quote them, live by their rulings, even though those rulings confined and defined us, squashing us into shapes we could never, ever, sustain, because we are not they, or is it them? We are absolute and unique and there is no copy, not even in a twin. When we are caught up in appearances, we will always be a shadow of what we can be, always, because we are an I. A single I, and this I is not part of a We, not in design, not in mind, nor body, nor experience. I am unique, and if my uniqueness bothers you then it may, respectfully, be your problem, and not mine.

The past and our present are separated by a divide. It is, initially, once we choose to work on discovering our own self,a narrow one, like a slight tectonic shift. The crack is not threatening, as yet, but because of this weakness revealed in the earth’s structure, we know it will widen. And, in the story of our past and our present, this is a good thing. Initially, we can easily leap from present to past, for reassurance, perhaps, validation, if we’re lucky, but it will widen, leaving us one day orphaned and feeling very alone. We are I now, aren’t we? I know that can be scary if the scared ‘I’ has been a significant part of We for longtime, but take courage, and really take notice of your gut, your inner voice of wisdom, because there lies the truth. What any of us were required to be as children, teens, partners or in the workplace does not define the I in any of us. I stands tall and alone. It begins a sentence. It takes back the power from We. And, as you probably all know, someone inside the We is just the one who is determined to retain the status quo and therefore to control.

I have no idea where all that came from, or maybe I do. I watch too many talented beautiful people remain inside the We for safety, protection and appearances, including myself. But I know, now, as I head for 71 as a determined I, that Life is still waiting for that chance to hunker down, to lift you on her back and thence to head for the stars.

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Island Blog – A Lift into Sparkle

Oh my gosh was I tired today. I remember so many people answering me ‘tired’ when I asked How are you?, and, I confess, I could feel irritation rise in my gut. I wanted to push for a single positive in their life, almost to shake them. Oh, what I have learned since those days! I guess its experiential compassion. And, more, that, the pretence that life is always wonderful, is good, in balance. But an overdose of ‘wonderful’ is, frankly, both unreal and impossible and therefore not to be believed. However, I was brought up this way. You left your ‘stuff’ at home and, out there, you were upbeat and cheerful. There was a dichotomy in that, nonetheless because once back home the lode re-landed with a big heavy thump and nobody, including me had addressed the ‘stuff’ or even knew how to. I heard it chortle like a goblin as it held me in stasis, thrilling with its power and control. For years I avoided asking the How Are You question, or asking it whilst in full flight, not waiting for the answer, afeared that involving meant solving. Not now. Now I know what it is like to feel lonely, lost and scared, my ‘stuff’ all consuming, the goblin growing into a giant. Perhaps that is where they were, those ones I hurtled past in my busy and productive life, so called. Perhaps, had I stopped to ask, to listen, to lay a hand on another’s, to say I’m here, I might have made a difference to them. Although I could never sort their stuff, not even my own, that act of friendship just might have lifted them a little at a pivotal moment in their lives whilst taking nothing away from my own. In fact, it might have shifted my perception and that, I have learned, is always a good thing. A self-centred life is all very well, but nobody learns a thing from such a life, including the person living it.

I am just returned from a visit to the cancer centre in Glasgow. The hotel is near the clinic, minutes away in fact. I found Google maps and did the whole thing of current location and destination. But, then, I couldn’t work out how to hold my phone. This way takes me left, that way, right. I could wander for days if I don’t get this right. Here comes someone, airpods in, moving purposefully. We make eye contact. Can you help me please, I ask, with a smile. I get one back and I can feel the warmth of it. He stops. Sure, he says. He must be all of 25, and in a hurry. Yet still, he is kind. I may have electric blue hair, but he will have clocked the wrinkles. I’m heading for the cancer clinic, I say, oncology department. He melts. You say cancer and everyone melts, as I do. I think it is up here…..I wave my arm across most of Glasgow. He grins. Yes, but bring that arm in. It is just above us, up that wee hill, just a couple of minutes. That’s the main entrance. I thank him and we share an eye smile. He could be my son and he is kind and he stopped for me. Braced and re-energised, I march up said hill and down again, a little, down toward the entrance, where everyone looks down. Of course they do. Whether going in or coming out, there is a cancer in there somewhere.

Through the doors and I am assailed with signs, people moving by, more people than I see in a week on the island. Nothing fits with my instructions. I swing round and back again, looking daft. Can I help you? asks a woman with a badge. Oh, yes please, I am here for a CT scan. Radiography, she says, and points to the big sign I obviously missed. I march on, more corridors, more possible rights and lefts. I ignore them all, arriving at a reception desk where I am greeted with a big smile and a welcome, as if I was the DJ for their party. It chuckles me and I love it. I give my details and am guided to take a seat, which I take amongst others who look up through sad eyes and down again. I am here with cancer. They have cancer. We are all scared.

I politely stick my butt in a chair and settle beneath the ghastly tube lighting. We are slightly off from the main drag, one that hums with passing nurses, technicians, equipment, patients in wheelchairs, patients in rolling beds. We all watch. We all thank our lucky stars, for now. After fifteen minutes of a silence that begs, longs to evolve into chat, I know it is I who will do this. I am the DJ. How can I begin, I wonder. It thinks me, a lot, and then I find something. Does anyone know if it’s ok to keep a mobile on? (I know the answer, but that’s not. the point). Oh, you can connect, a woman says, she, with her husband in a wheelchair, You just look on the wall, there’s the wifi and the password. I thank her and rise, crossing the divide. I am now respectfully between her and another man with a stick. I smile at both, casting a rainbow. I sign in, not that I give a damn about wifi right now, and see my Poppy dog as my screensaver. I pivot to the woman, show her. Oh, she says, Oh, and asks me to show her husband, which I do. He tells me their border terrier died 12 weeks ago and they are both lost without him. I say how sorry I am and that my own wee girl is also dead, not so long ago. I ask questions about their dog, how they feel, and warmth rises. Then I go back to my seat and ask the young woman beside me if she has a dog. She has, she had, she also mourns her wee yorkie, is completely lost without her. We all talk dog for a while, and if I look, I can see the connections multiply across the thoroughly scrubbed floor of a cancer waiting room. It’s like theNorthern Lights and as beautiful. The last man in, the one with the stick is yet to be drawn in. So, I say, do you have a dog? He beams. I do, a German Shepherd. A beautiful girl. Tell me about her, I say, leaning forward, and he does and every single one of us is thoroughly engaged.

And, despite what any of us are going through or facing, I could see tiredness lift into a sparkle.

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Island Blog – You Are the One

So here we are, again, in a new year, a new thing, a thing we might find weighty in our hands. Look at those hands, the ones that loved, protected, damaged, and controlled. They are your hands. They have immense power and can hold the weight, if lift is our thinking, and it has to be. Those hands need to shift their thinks.  The sink is all around us, the cruelty, the ignorance of so so many others. Recently, I was in the city, for cancer wotwot, and saw the pavement people, everyone walking by, sharp, fast, refusing. I realised that, since Covid, nobody has cash, but that is not ok. So not ok.

I have heard until, until I am fed up of hearing the voices of the ‘rich’, whispering that, if you give, your gift will be spent on drink or drugs. Do not listen. I don’t. And here’s the thing. Nobody on the street is warm, welcomed, fed, cosy. Not one. They didn’t come here from optimum choice, but from a place of loss, one way or another. Giving is what we must do if this broken world is ever to heal. 

Wherever you grow, bloom strong and petal wide, don’t hide, but spread your colour, blue, is it, red, or butter yellow, white? Be right with it, your colour, for it is yours alone. Hold your own. Your ground may be rocky, may be rich and soft, a mountainside, a beach path, garden, river bank. Give thanks for wherever you find yourself. Hold out your petals, let them fly. Reach and reach up to the light, breathe right. Your breath is life, in joy or strife, breathe on, breathe life. In shade or sun, you are the one. Make a difference. Have fun and look around you. Who grows beside or over there? Another soul with hopeful roots, just pushing through in fear, perhaps, a delicate heart, easily broken by careless feet or the lash of punishing rain, only to die. in silence. 

Cry out in anger, but stand your ground, for those who stand will remember those who fall. All of them. And share your light, your bright, your coloured heart, beating yet on the battlefield. Don’t yield, but glow with life, and, tender-fingered, lift a drooping head. Warm a faltering body, say I Am Here, and I will not leave you empty.  Share your mystery, your very soul. Hide nothing, let nothing cold you, hold you fixed in ice.

Notice every season, reason, but not too much. Touch another, lift, don’t drift, for Time moves on, fleeing like a thief in disbelief. Hold each blooming moment, roots in the earth, head in the sky. Let pain go by, toss it to the wind, the changeling wind with stories on her back. Remember this, don’t miss the chance to lead another to the dance. Share your light. Be curious, like Alice, and leave your smile among the trees for bees to honey up and sweeten. Reflect the sun, the rain, the moon, and do it soon, because winter always comes, and for some it never leaves. 

No matter your ground, make it better for your being there. Nourishing, flourishing, sharing, caring, thankfully placed. Just where you need to be. Let laughter fill your throat and let it fly out like birds or butterflies to lift a flagging soul up and out of sadness, to spin the bitter into glitter. A million rainbows lie within you, let them show, because you know that, no matter the chatter, you have the power to choose or lose out. Here. Today. Right this minute. Tick. Tick, Tock, they say, don’t look away, but stay, because this ground needs you and there are seedlings at your feet. 

In shade or sun, You Are the One.

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Island Blog – Find your Guide

On the theme of Help, I have something to say. We, I ,have discovered over endless years, that everyone resists it. I can do this all by myself, they say, or indicate with a shovel full of all that they have achieved before this Help thing moved in like a drift of autumn leaves. Not welcome. But we change. Of course we do. I remember himself saying to me, more than once, bless him, that he had never changed, refused to change, would not change. I was too young to see this as a serious condition, latterly I did. We all change because life changes, life changes us. Our power lies in acknowledging this change, this transformation, this dynamic twist and swirl to the person we believe we are, a challenge to transist, new word. Mine, obviously.

I found my hands less able to lift and stack wood. I looked out, asked for help and it came, big time. All wood lifted and stacked and also the joy of half an hour over coffee with a delicious young man, friend of my lads. However, and there is always one of those, as my eyes scan the past, my past, when I was all NO! I can do this all by myself, I can hear the offers of help. So, why did I resist? Why did I do the everything of everything until it made me ill, depressed, anorexic?

I have no answer to that. I also notice that my young, my extended family young, all say the same thing. I can do this, no help required. Perhaps it is a human thing, or, perhaps it is all about our current culture of succeed or fail and the pressure is immense, in a career, in being a mother, a father, there’s no escape from any of it. It’s like a push to your back, a hiding from what is not good, a protection from loved ones, a split from reality. But how can our young see this reality thing, so far from gathering whelks, firewood, fircones for kindling? So very far. In an urban situ, the roads busy, the boss bossy, the troubled teens online upstairs, money the driving force, what hope? Well, I ask this, but don’t you ask this because I believe that a gazillion youngs are working this out. Just be there. Doesn’t matter where you live. Where they live. They are brilliant human beings, loving, caring, watching, learning. And, here’s Granny……

Ask for help, for guidance, if that works better. We are a human team. Find your guide, for now.

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Island Blog – The Jousting Woman

Women used to joust, you know, back in the jousting days. Needless to say, they had to look like men, breasts bound. But, coated in gmail, no, chainmail, sorry, all they needed were huge biceps, strong thighs for clamping a horse, hands free, great eye-arm precision and bloody mindedness; a Boudicca sort of attitude and a kick ass determination to be a fighter, regardless of their sex. Altough jousting was fast and furious, it rarely ended in tragedy, but only in collapsed pride. Women, wiry and flexible are less rigid, less stuck in the ways of men and, more importantly, less encumbered by ego and swagger. In fact, swaggering is not what we bother with at all. Wrong shape for starters.

I will get the call tomorrow, the one from my wonderful surgeon, the one who will tell me the wotwot of my nexting. I will hear that only radiotherapy is next, after Christmas, and for one week. Or, I will hear that more surgery is required and, then, the radiotherapy. I have said I refuse chemo. I’ve seen too many of my community go for it, only to lose a year, at least, in sickness and pale-faceless and loss of self-confidence, and then, for some, to fade away anyway. No bloody thanks. However, if I was 40 (loved that birthday) I might have chosen differently, but I am not, I am 70 and that’s a fricken long life. I have lived like nobody else has lived. I have adventured every single day, dealt with chaos, damage, disaster and celebrations which everyone who came would agree were the best. Me and the old bugger were excellent party hosts. Just saying.

Not that I am going under. Whatever my results are, I am ready and peaceful. I cannot control the most of it, but I can control me and my attitude and. my thankfulness and my humour and that mischievous imp behind my eyes and in my throat. I can do that because life is the most wonderful thing. My life is the most wonderful thing. So, btw, is yours because without it, there is nothing much.

So, although I began with jousting, I still like the thought of Joan of Arc-ing myself up to meet the stranger which is Cancer. I doubt I could hold the chainmail, nor clamp the horse, hands free, but there is something about flying there, about letting go, and not just of the joust pole; like a spirited game-on thingy, the pounding of hooves, the tension, the timing, the invisibility.

Whatever I hear tomorrow will take me forward, and forward is the only way for a jousting woman.

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Island Blog – A Wonderful Thing

I’ve decided. I may have breast cancer and wotwot, but the knowledge has kicked my wobbly butt. I used to think that bereavement and loneliness was a fricking big deal not so long ago. Then I was Nearly Dead for a couple of weeks and now cancer is my new companion, offering a new perspective. It thinks me. How Life twist and tapselteeries us, what a tumbler, a flipdoodle, and once a simple human using a minute percentage of her huge brain has come to some sort of agreement with all this twisting, tumbling, flipdoodling thingy, there remains a think or two. So much of it all is way beyond my control, but there are snippets of life or self, over which I have complete control. So that is the country in which I have landed. It is new territory, for sure. I have sat on said wobbly butt for almost 3 years now and you can tell. I refuse to run anywhere for fear of setting off a landslide. Looking out at Life through windows is no way to live, even if the looker cannot see any side of Life to which he or she belongs any more. Once, she was this busy, rushing, active, caring woman and now, well now, she is a blob, a pointless one. It isn’t that she misses the man to whom she was married, because she doesn’t. He was wonderful and infuriating. He was everything to her and he drove her to distraction. He reached his Sell By date most timely. She was done with caring for him. And yet, and yet, his presence was something she thought she could live without and with ease and, in that, she was delusional. His company, his very self had merged with her own, dammit. She knows that now. It took that horsefly bite, that collapse into Nearly Deadness and the subsequent cancer Hallo, to sharpen her wits, to tell her that she is now her own purpose and that knowledge requires action.

So, I call the local swimming pool. Local! ha! It is 23 winding miles away, a real shlep and I do not like swimming pools, no thank you. However, my wobbly butt tells me it needs attention and not the unwanted sort. I, through 3 years of sitting on it, writing, sewing, hiding, reading, are done. I had to go for a chest Xray this morning and that takes me very close, dangerously so, to the damn swimming pool. So, I clear my throat and call. I speak to Nadia, delightful, and she tells me there are no lessons on a Friday. I explain, overly so, that I must build up muscle tone having lost it all somewhere, although I couldn’t tell her where. X ray complete, no metal, no, hold this, rest your chin, done, thanks Helen. The sun is warm, ditto the wind. Glorious. Well no excuse now. Damnit again. I arrive, book in, swim, hating the first two lengths and then, and then, I get into my stride. Instead of jerking and splashing and hating it, I begin to flow. Well, sort of. After I spend a while chatting with the girls at reception and we laugh and connect and now I have to go again next week because I said I would.

I swing my sassy mini out of the car park and drive home. My energy level is up. It hasn’t been anywhere near the Up thing for 3 years. I grab a mushroom omelet for lunch and decide to take the barky terrier (bored) to Calgary beach, ignoring the usual flaps about No Parking Spaces, or Meeting The Bus on That Tiny Road (especially on corners) and we are off! I feel wild again, my favourite feeling. No jumper required. Only a poo bag and a my phone for photos. The sky is as blue as my hair, the tide way out (Blue Moon) and it is lunchtime so the sands are almost empty. The bay is huge and we walk it, in and out of the warm saltwater. Geese fly overhead and I almost fall over watching them. Life. Life. Life abounds, and in me too.

Home again but still fizzing with NRG, I decide to wander to the shore to gather sloes for gin, even as I have no gin, yet. I balance cautiously, on the rickety rocks of the shore, and gather the beautiful blue berries. I hear seabirds, the rush of a changing tide, the laughter of children somewhere across the sealoch. I wander home as leaves fall around me. The faithful old trees are heading for a long sleep, and Autumn is in full and fine fettle holding up blue skies and clouds, stars, Lady Moon and Father Sun. The circle of Life circles on, as I move gently through memories and hurts and joys and promises of more to come. I don’t know what, of course, but just the knowing is a wonderful thing.

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Island Blog – We Got This

And, then, today. Children, including Little Boots, to school for nine (the older girls), and a new nursery for LB. A new nursery, strange people, other kids, unknown space and all, but she was in like she already knew the lot. How must it be for someone so wee? Looking up noses, level pegging with knees and hip bones. I don’t remember it, thankfully.

The day, as it does for young mums and dads, pulls away like a bolting horse. There is breakfast to wash up, a dicey floor food scrap mosaic for Henry to guzzle up, two cats to feed, washing to wash, dinner to consider and prep, plans to make for later, the swim lessons some miles away, the snacks to make for the journey to appease tired girls, hangry girls. We found the swim pool, swimmed, came home again, home again, jiggetty jig. There is allotted time for ‘devices’, an allotted time that is always way too short for the players, then a wee snack, a peek at the Night Garden and off up the stairs to bedlington. In theory, there’s a night of sleep ahead, but this is never guaranteed, for there be dragons in the dark, as I remember well. Life rolls on, bolts on, lurches from dance class through swim, play dates, parties and athletics, all a drive away, all with a timeline. The time these parents spend in parking slots waiting, and waiting is just a bit part in the huge production of young parenthood. I watch it, and I remember, but vaguely. At Tapselteerie we had no television reception, no devices, no computers, no mobile phones and, do you know what? I am so very glad because I would never have had the patience for what is the norm today. Never.

Cooler now, and I think of home, of my friend up there living in a home with underfloor heating off, a range off, looking after my wee Poppy dog who looks quite the thing on rocks by the shore, all fluffy and not bothered with the coolth of these days. It is as if I left in one season and will return in the next, which is true, I will. The missing of that change in my own place, my home place, my bone place, my roots, always comes like a stranger to me. It did in those times I went to Africa one month and returned 2 later to snow boots and waterproofs when I only carried a light jumper, sneakers and a piddly jacket to cover my upper echelons. Waiting for the bus at Glasgow airport, I stood out like a fairy in Buchanan Street. It laughed me somewhat, through the grinning shivers.

As I do this waiting thing, I laugh and chuckle with a scatterdore of children. I watch the parents duck and dive, consider, negotiate, and sensitively, oh so sensitively, work with the new generation, to grow them into strong, unbiased, feisty individuals. I, perhaps, did the same, we did, because it took mum and dad to do this, at least, for us and for ours. It sure looks like we did ok, as I observe the five results out there doing this living thing, in the now of now. I wonder if he noticed this, the dead dad of 3 years tomorrow. He didn’t talk much about it, about how our children ‘turned out’, but I believe he was impressed with the way they grew far beyond us, way outside our understanding, our ‘norm’. He smiled a lot around our young, got grumpy with the noise of young-ness, felt, I am guessing, de trop with a lot of their lives, as I can myself. Too many girls, he would growl. 8 of them and just one boy, nine girls now and only 2 boys. A fractal world in his mind.

So, tomorrow, old sea dog, we will remember the day you died. It was lunchtime, ish. The boys laid bets on the time. It was gallows humour, and anyone who has witnessed the dying of a parent will understand that humour.

And then we move on. We got this.

by

Island Blog – Hallo and Thank you

Today I woke too early, my head full of monsters. Will I have major or minor surgery? Will I be strong enough to deal with it all? What will be the treatment after? Will I forget my headphones? (locate my headphones), or miss the ferry because the milk lorry has capsized in the Glen? Will I arrive, as I did for the Nearly Dead hospital visit, with one nightie, no cardy and no tweezers? Tweezers? Seriously? Will my little beloved dog fall ill when I’m away, and how long will I be away? Will the chimney sweep come, will the garden go to riot because I’m not watching it? Okay, you get the monsters. They all say YES, to all of the above, of course they do, the negative bastards.

Right, you lot, I said, startling the small dog into barks and a leap from her bed. Right! No, Wrong! You is NOT getting me in a right fankle at 04.30 whilst still inside my nightie (take 3, maybe four, do I have four?) and with my eyes barely focussed, you is not. We all rose from the tangle of duvet and I did try to leave them upstairs but they had a different plan. We watched the early birds, the light spreading over the sea-loch, over my garden, over the land, like a new story. Heretofore, this has given me a new vision, a new day, a new dawn, but this morning, no. The damn monsters of fear and anxiety, of a still resident exhaustion in my battle to be undead, kept up their clatter-chatter. It is a longtime since I had to fight them in this way. I tell myself, it is okay to feel these feelings, but it isn’t okay at all because they give me indigestion and backache and a squiffy head and no inner peace. I tell myself that anyone else would feel this way, but that doesn’t help either.

Do I not appreciate the support and love from my family, friends and blog readers? Yes, I do very much. So, why isn’t that enough? It thinks me, a lot and those thinks lead me to the (possible) conclusion that, no matter how many are around us, surround us, we ultimately sail alone. We need to manage our own craft across all sorts of dodgy oceans. In the knowing of that, I managed the hours of today, just. I rested a lot, read a whole book, walked into Tapselteerie and met not one soul, something that would normally delight me, but not today. Today I wished for an encounter, just a wee hallo and a passing chat. I went to the shop for a few bits now that my ‘recovery’ and ‘preparation’ demands a whole load of dark green vegetables, pulses, seeds and probiotics. I didn’t even know what that meant before now. I just cooked and ate.

I have decided that this living alone thing is not much fun, not when you want a Resident Familiar to proffer balance in the face of inner monsters. That smile, that joke, that ‘come on, let’s go out for coffee’, or to the beach, or something. Although my Resident Familiar left the relationship a long time ago when dementia arrived to take up residence, he was still here, a sometimes warm, living Familiar. I don’t want him back, but that is not the point. When a girl is swept off her feet at just 18 when she still has no idea about life beyond the parental home, she can be forgiven for feeling somewhat lost after 50 bonkers years of marriage to a dominant male and on the adventure of a lifetime. Being alone means I have to instigate everything and others, who have a Resident Familiar, are, well, busy until next Tuesday. I get that. I was always busy till next Tuesday, and for decades. But, on the other side of that, being alone is marvellous, so freeing, so uplifting, so damn new. How bizarre.

I am not moaning. Tomorrow will come and will proffer a new set of ideas, new feelings. Today is just today. So why do I write a blog? Should I not, instead, keep all of this to myself so as to spare whoever reads these words? Possibly, but I have been a polite girl/woman for a very long time and right now I feel raw and bloody and honest and congruent. I don’t want phone chats, don’t want visitors, don’t want anything at all, in truth, other than for these feelings to melt away. I am effortlessly positive as a rule because that is how I see this gift of a life. Perhaps, then, I am simply in a place I do not recognise, one that upskittles me, tries to trip me right over. Yes, that’s it. I don’t know this terrain and it is hostile. Simples. And it really helps to write and to post. Really, it does. In writing out my feelings about whatever is going on, and to send it into the ether, whatever that is, my spirits lift into a reassurance, that no face to face contact can give me. I think of you all, in Canada, In the States, in Englandshire, in Scotland, on islands across the world, and I reach out, saying, through my own stories, Hallo and Thank you for being there, for clicking on the ‘follow’ link to my blog, for reading my words. I also imagine your lives, tough at times, maybe many many times, easy here and there, the infuriations, the lifts, the shocks, the abundance and the lack. The bones of a life, the flesh and the guts of an ordinary/extraordinary time on this goodly earth. Life, I love you. I truly do.

See? I feel better now, just writing this. Hallo you all. And Thankyou.